Very few small dance companies celebrate their 30th anniversary twice in one season. Few small dance companies celebrate their 30th anniversary, period. Mortality always threatens in this business. So let us give a shout out to one that survived and prospered. Alonzo King's Lines Ballet opened the second installment of its anniversary festivities Friday evening at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Lam Research Theater with a premiere and a mini-retrospective danced by the company's 12 members with an arching physicality and certifiable elan that compensated for a few problematic if not enigmatic moments.

Still the three-decade journey that has taken former ballet dancer King from an inaugural matinee at San Francisco State University (yes, I was there) to Europe's fabled dance palaces has also generated a species of contemporary classicism that demands exceptional execution. King's dances don't seem at the end of their emotional tethers; they seem to inhabit a sphere beyond, where a curious serenity reigns in the midst of all that action. Watching King construct sequences of steps that, according to dance manuals aren't supposed to go together is a remarkable experience.

One can participate in that experience in the spring's premiere, which I am told, will be titled "Meyer," not as in lemon, but as in Edgar Meyer, the ace double bassist and composer who has penned an appealingly jazzy new score and leads the onstage combo. The work, for all its excitement, seems a transitional effort. King has always found solos and duets the most congenial configurations, and there's an extraordinary specimen of the latter, uniting Meredith Webster and David Harvey in a floor-oriented battle royal.

But King is also experimenting with narrative elements in "Meyer." In the fifth of seven sections, you can draw your own conclusion about the cards Harvey shuffles on the floor and distributes to the ensemble who regard them as some kind of healing balm, rubbing them over their bodies. King has also provided a real, full-company finale with the stage awash in pumping arms and sweeping extensions. This feels like more than an assemblage of knockout moments. It's a promising development.

Hollywood's Jim Doyle has provided a striking backdrop of dripping water both real (Riccardo Zayas bathes in it at one point) and computer generated. Meyer, who travels the stage with his fiddle, also doubles on piano. Violinist Rob Moore and cellist Gabriel Cabezas are the other musicians.

King has never demonstrated much interest in preserving repertoire, but revivals certainly work on an anniversary program. The excerpts from "Handel" (2005) open with the marvelous Caroline Rocher in stiff tutu delivering a solo that recalls William Forsythe at his spikiest and end with Courtney Henry spinning with vehemence. An episode from "Writing Ground" (made by King for the Monaco Dance Forum in 2010 and never seen here in its entirety) found Webster in rags, alternately buffeted, protected and elevated by a male quartet, all to an intriguing vocal score by Jean-Phillipe Rykiel and Lama Gyurme. The piece should be imported.

The finale for the entire company from 1994's "Ocean" recalls King's memorable collaboration with El Hamideen and Pharoah Sanders. These projects with living composers have always inspired the best from this choreographer, and this stretched ensemble, in which Paul Knobloch and Yujin Kim stood out, proved the rule rather than the exception.